Architecture stands out from other professions within the service sector, particularly education, health and social care, as having escaped the drive to measure performance. The proposition underlying the RIBA's recent research symposium 'The Design Quality Proposition: ensuring and communicating design quality in architectural practice' is that the value of design quality could be communicated more effectively to clients if it was verified through measurement. Although standardised methodologies for evaluating building performance are available, these are still rarely fully embedded in practice. With their emphasis on energy efficiency and carbon emission, these methods are also too narrow in scope to provide comprehensive tools for measuring design quality. The symposium illuminated the way architects are confronted with the challenge of evaluating a wider range of'qualities'.
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